Aides of President Joe Biden “illegally edited the transcript” of Biden’s “garbage” smear of Trump supporters, “violating the Presidential Records Act,” House Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY) said Thursday.
White House press officials pressured stenographers to cover up Biden’s “garbage” smear by editing the transcript to alter its meaning, according to two U.S. government officials and an internal email obtained by the Association Press.
The White House stenographers added an apostrophe to “supporters” and an em-dash to alter the meaning of Biden’s statement.
The coverup was “a breach of protocol and spoilation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices,” according to the stenographer’s email.
“The American people deserve to know that Joe Biden and the Democrats are so desperate after his disgraceful comment calling 250 million Trump-supporting Americans ‘garbage,’ that the Biden White House illegally edited the transcript violating the Presidential Records Act,” Stefanik posted on X.
“[T]he most important question, did Kamala Harris and her campaign request this illegal edit?” she asked.
The AP reported on how the edit occurred:
The change was made after the press office “conferred with the president,” according to an internal email from the head of the stenographers’ office that was obtained by The AP. The authenticity of the email was confirmed by two government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.
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According to the email, the press office had asked the stenographers to quickly produce a transcript of the call amid the firestorm. Biden himself took to social media to say that he he was not calling all Trump supporters garbage and that he was referring specifically to the “hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally.”
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The supervisor, a career employee of the White House, raised the concerns about the press office action — but did not weigh in on the accuracy of the edit — in an email to White House communications director Ben LaBolt, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and other press and communications officials.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.